Volkswagen Picks Mirantis' OpenStack for its Next-Gen Cloud

Back in 2013, when OpenStack was a very young cloud platform, I posted a prediction that we would see just a handful of widely adopted OpenStack distributions. That has started to happen, as many enterprises move from the evalutation stage to deploying OpenStack.

Among those enterprises, Volkswagen has just thrown its hat in the ring, and has chosen Mirantis' OpenStack distribution as its global standard for next-generation private cloud computing. Some see the choice as a snub for Red Hat.

According to Volkswagen, "The open source cloud platform is projected to cut IT costs through joint standardization. It will support internal and consumer-facing applications and will connect people across Volkswagen, its dealers and suppliers. The joint project focuses on adding critical enterprise features to OpenStack to ensure that applications can be managed with high performance, enabling full control of data center infrastructure. The system will be fully optimized for Intel platform capabilities, making amazing experiences possible."

The announcement added:

"Following a comprehensive and rigorous selection process, Europe's largest automaker selected Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, as its OpenStack distribution vendor. Mirantis demonstrated a 98% execution rate across 64 use cases, and emerged as the most stable and fastest to implement among industry OpenStack distributions. Volkswagen Group will leverage Mirantis OpenStack to power applications in all Volkswagen Group brands."

Mario Müller, Volkswagen's VP of IT Infrastructure, said: "As the automotive industry shifts to the service economy, Volkswagen is poised for agile software innovation. The team at Mirantis gives us a robust, hardened distribution, deep technical expertise, a commitment to the OpenStack community, and the ability to drive cloud transformation at Volkswagen. Mirantis OpenStack is the engine that lets Volkswagen's developers build and deliver software faster."

"OpenStack is the open source cloud standard offering companies a fast path to cloud innovation. It is our privilege to partner with Europe's largest automaker and we are thrilled to support them as they use the software to out-innovate competitors and expand their business on a global scale," said Mirantis SVP, Marque Teegardin.

According to Network World, though, it's news that Red Hat didn't get the nod from VW:

"Big news for a number of reasons. VW is, after all, a Red Hat shop (or historically has been, anyway). Big news because this is a fantastic proof point for OpenStack, in particular, heading into the OpenStack summit next month in Austin."

 In other OpenStack news, we covered the arrival of Mitaka, OpenStack's 13th version, in this post.